WASHINGTON
-- A Democratic Party source confirmed to The Huffington Post that the
party will include a plank supporting marriage equality in its official
platform at the upcoming convention.

The news, first reported by the Washington Blade,
represents a historic and phenomenal win for LGBT rights groups, which
could hardly have envisioned progress being made so quickly on this
front.

The Democratic source relayed that officials unanimously
agreed at a recent platform drafting committee meeting in Minneapolis to
adopt language endorsing same-sex marriage. Several steps must be taken
before the language is codified. A full platform committee will
consider the draft in a meeting in Detroit in two weeks. It will then go
to the convention delegates in Charlotte for final approval. But the
deal is more or less final.

Retiring Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass), a member of the drafting committee who recently married his longtime partner, told the Advocate that the decision was reached without dissent.

"The
fact is, by every action that should be taken, the Democrats in
Washington have repudiated DOMA," he said, referring to the 1996 law
signed by President Bill Clinton that barred the federal government from
recognizing same-sex marriage.

According to the Blade,
the "language in the platform approved on Sunday not only backs marriage
equality, but also rejects DOMA and has positive language with regard
to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The exact wording of the
language wasn’t immediately available."

Even
with a persistent gender gap in a presidential election year, House
Republicans have not given up on their campaign to narrow access to
birth control, abortion care and lifesaving cancer screenings. Far from
it.

A new Republican spending proposal
revives some of the more extreme attacks on women’s health and freedom
that were blocked by the Senate earlier in this Congress. The
resurrection is part of an alarming national crusade that goes beyond
abortion rights and strikes broadly at women’s health in general.

These
setbacks are recycled from the Congressional trash bin in the fiscal
2013 spending bill for federal health, labor and education programs
approved by a House appropriations subcommittee on July 18 over loud
objections from Democratic members to these and other provisions.

The
measure would bar Planned Parenthood’s network of clinics, which serve
millions of women across the country, from receiving any federal money
unless the health group agreed to no longer offer abortion services for
which it uses no federal dollars — a patently unconstitutional
provision. It would also eliminate financing for Title X, the effective
federal family-planning program for low-income women that provides birth
control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for
sexually-transmitted diseases. Without this program, some women would
die, and unintended pregnancies would rise, resulting in some 400,000
more abortions a year and increases in Medicaid-related costs, according
to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading authority on reproductive
health.

On top of that, the bill would prevent implementation of
most of the Affordable Care Act, wiping out its numerous advances for
women’s health. It would seriously weaken the requirement that employee
insurance plans cover birth control and other preventive health services
by allowing any employer to opt out based on personal religious beliefs
or moral objections.

WASHINGTON
— The White House called Monday on Republican presidential hopeful Mitt
Romney to explain recent remarks including his apparent endorsement of
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a position that counters US policy.

Romney,
in the midst of a three-nation tour, gave a speech Sunday in Jerusalem
where he hailed the city as “the capital of Israel,” in apparent support
of a position held by the Jewish state but never accepted by the global
community.

The comment was swiftly rejected by Palestinian
negotiator Saeb Erakat as “unacceptable” and “harmful to American
interests in our region.”

But after Romney made fresh
controversial statements Monday to donors in Jerusalem including
suggesting Israeli “culture” helped explain the country’s economic
success — a position Erakat denounced as “racist” — President Barack
Obama’s office urged Romney to clarify his comments.

“One of the
challenges of being an actor on the international stage, particularly
when you’re traveling to such a sensitive part of the world, is that
your comments are very closely scrutinized for meaning, for nuance, for
motivation,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said about the Monday
remarks.

Mitt Romney Comments At Fundraiser Outrage Palestinians

JERUSALEM
-- Mitt Romney told Jewish donors Monday that their culture is part of
what has allowed them to be more economically successful than the
Palestinians, outraging Palestinian leaders who suggested his comments
were racist and out of touch with the realities of the Middle East.
Romney's campaign later said his remarks were mischaracterized.

"As
you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel
which is about $21,000, and compare that with the GDP per capita just
across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more
like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference
in economic vitality," the Republican presidential candidate told about
40 wealthy donors who ate breakfast at the luxurious King David Hotel.

Romney said some economic histories have theorized that "culture makes all the difference."
"And
as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the
accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of
at least culture and a few other things," Romney said, citing an
innovative business climate, the Jewish history of thriving in difficult
circumstances and the "hand of providence." He said similar disparity
exists between neighboring countries, like Mexico and the United States.

The
speech on the "values of liberty" at Warsaw University on Tuesday is
expected to seek to rekindle the flames of US cold war righteousness by
featuring a strong attack on Russia
and President Vladimir Putin's rollback of democratic gains, while also
criticising the US president, Barack Obama, for allegedly sacrificing
the interests and security of central European democracy in favour of
realpolitik with the Kremlin.

Romney has previously described
Russia as America's "No 1 geopolitical foe", in contrast with Obama, who
has sought to press "the reset button" in relations with Moscow.

Mitt
Romney was a Mormon bishop for five years in the 1980′s in addition to
being president of the Boston chapter. The BBC interviews a former
parishioner of the Boston Mormon church that Mitt Romney was bishop of;
her name is Peggy Hayes. She tells the BBC her story that she has never
shared in an interview before.

Peggy got pregnant out of wedlock
and Mitt Romney came to visit her; she says he told her to give her
child up to the church for adoption. She also says that if she didn’t
give up her child to the church – Romney threatened to have her
excommunicated from the church.

“I said well
are you suggesting that I give up my child to the church. And he pretty
much said – yeah, that’s exactly what we we’re asking you to do … is to
give up your child to the church. And he said somewhat casually – well
… you know you’re facing some serious consequences pretty much. And if
you don’t give up your child then you would considered to be in
violation of the doctrines of the church. And in effect what that would
mean is that you would be excommunicated.”~Peggy Hayes, former Romney parishioner

The
Boston Globe did an entire article on this on 8/26/94 – a blog captured
it (it’s currently behind a firewall) and you can read the entire story
HERE:

MADRID
— Spain’s conservative government has provoked a storm among women’s
groups with plans to tighten the country’s abortion laws to make the
procedure illegal in cases where the foetus is deformed.

The
government announced Friday it would alter an abortion law introduced by
its Socialist predecessors in 2010 which gave women the legal right to
abortion on demand for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy.

The 2010 law
also allowed women the legal right to abort up to the 22nd week of
pregnancy in cases where the mother’s health is at risk or the foetus
shows serious deformities.

In cases of an extremely severe serious
malformation of a foetus, an abortion could be carried out at any time
if approved by an ethics committee.

But last week Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon came out strongly against allowing abortion in cases of a deformed foetus.

“I
don’t understand why we should deprive a foetus of life by allowing
abortion for the simple reason that it suffers a handicap or a
deformity,” he said in an interview published in conservative daily La
Razon on July 22.

With all the commotion surrounding the Supreme Court and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it would be easy to overlook an important birthday: Today is the 47th anniversary of Medicare, the public health insurance program that covers our nation's seniors and people with severe disabilities.

It's
a birthday that deserves to be celebrated, including here in the Lone
Star State. Medicare provides 48 million Americans - about 3 million of
them in Texas - with reasonably good access to health care, thereby
easing their suffering, prolonging their lives, and reducing financial
pressures on them and their families. Before Medicare was enacted in
1965, most retired older people were at risk of financial ruin when they
got sick. Medicare changed that picture, and our state and nation are
much better for it.

The Medicare program is not perfect, of
course. It has burdensome co-pays and deductibles, and its benefits
could be better. But it remains immensely popular, and it's not hard to
figure out why. A new study in the journal Health Affairs found that
"Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and older are more satisfied with their
health insurance, have better access to care, and are less likely to
have problems paying medical bills than working-age adults who get
insurance through employers or purchase coverage on their own."

Keep
that in mind the next time you hear a politician or pundit argue that
the Medicare program should be converted to a private voucher program,
where seniors would get a flat amount to buy a health policy from a
commercial insurance company. Such schemes are lucrative for the big
private insurers but would be bad for most seniors, leaving them with
inferior and progressively deteriorating coverage.

Many
people are following the presidential election closely with the idea
that the outcome will have a major impact on national policy. However,
according to Steven Pearlstein, a veteran Washington Post columnist and reporter, it may not matter who wins the election. In a column last week,
Pearlstein told readers that the top executives of some of the
country's largest companies are getting together to craft a budget
package that they will try to push through Congress and get the
president to sign.

While Pearlstein clearly sees these backroom
meetings of corporate chieftains in positive terms (he refers to them as
"grown-ups" who have been noticeably absent from the conversation about
the budget), the rest of us might view this plotting a bit differently.
As Pearlstein openly acknowledges, this corporate coup is an end-run
around the electorate. As corrupt as the political process may have
become, at least we will get a vote in the election. Pearlstein's
plotters are not inviting the rest of us into the conversation.

Many
of the same folks who brought the economy to ruin just a few years ago
are now going to come up with a plan that is supposed to set the budget
and the economy on a forward path. At the center of their proposal are
big cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

The most popular Social Security cut among this gang is a reduction
in the annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) by 0.3 percentage
points. They are betting that ordinary people are too dumb to notice
this cut since it is a relatively small amount each year.

However,
the effect of this cut accumulates into a much bigger deal over time.
After 10 years it is roughly 3 percent, after 20 years it would be close
to 6 percent, and after 30 years it would be close to 9 percent.

Last February, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire signed the marriage equality
bill in an emotional ceremony. Two rival groups of marriage opponents
immediately tried to collect enough signatures to put an initiative on
the ballot to repeal the law—one failed. However, in June religious activists collected enough signatures to force the question onto the November ballot. Referendum
74 asks voters to approve or reject the marriage equality law. If
approved, Washington officially becomes the sixth state, plus the
District of Columbia, to recognize gay marriages.

“To get this
[pledge] from a straight, married couple sends a powerful message that
marriage is seen as a fundamental question of fairness,” Zach Silk, the
campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage, told the New York Times Thursday.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer have already donated $100,000 to the referendum campaign, the Times reports. But the historic pledge from Bezos, who runs a $48 billion-a-year retail empire, is considered a game-changer.

And
the money is much needed, especially considering the cost of TV air
time during this election year. Washington United for Marriage needs to
explain why it is important to keep marriage equality in the state—they
have not yet noted, for instance, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement on Monday, July 24,
the one year anniversary of the Marriage Equality Act, that same sex
marriages have equality generated an estimated $259 million in economic
impact and $16 million in city revenues. AND they need to explain HOW to
vote to retain marriage—that is a vote to APPROVE or yes on Referendum
74.

This weekend's New York Times "Room for Debate" asks whether today's men are "manly enough": "A-list actors are getting facials in Mansome, Morgan Spurlock’s newest documentary, and pumping their waxed chests in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, one of the summer’s most popular movies. But is all this exfoliated, chiseled perfection what women really want ? And should men really be making it a priority?"

In Charles Mee’s 2001 play Big Love ,
one of the title characters delivers a soliloquy in which he bemoans
the difficulty for men in living up to gender stereotypes. On one hand,
men are expected to be civilized—calm, gracious, and sophisticated. But
when violence is called for, and people—especially women—need defending,
they expect men to be the rescuers, “going at the target like a
bullet...with rage in his heart...with no breaks to hold it.”

The
even bigger challenge is presented when the need for such violence has
passed. After the conflict, men are expected to automatically revert
back to calm, civilized members of society. Women, he argues, have the
luxury of deploring the violence of men (because they can depend on that
violence when they need its protection) without having to give in to
such impulses themselves.

While the play is fictional, the idea
that gender stereotypes adversely affect both men and women is very much
a reality. I've witnessed this countless times from even my most
feminist of girlfriends. They want men who are sensitive, who are
considerate, who are emotional. But in only in very specific instances.
Because at other times, they want the Alpha Male. The one who will fix
the drain in the sink and protect them from rapists on the walk home.
They want Don Draper.

U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says that the pivotal decision
which reversed a law that prohibited women from using contraception is
not supported under his interpretation of the Constitution.

During
an interview on Sunday, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Scalia why he
believed that it is a “lie” that women have a Constitutional right to
abortion.

“Nobody ever thought that the America people voted to
prohibit limitations on abortions,” the 76-year-old conservative justice
explained. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that.”

“What about the right to privacy that the court found in 1965?” Wallace pressed.

“There’s no right to privacy in the Constitution — no generalized right to privacy,” Scalia insisted.

“Well, in the Griswold case, the court said there was,” Wallace pointed out.

As
we mark the one year anniversary of the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau (CFPB), I've been thinking about how for years leading up to the
2008 financial crisis, I asked students in my contract law class to read
a credit card agreement -- either an offer that they'd received in the
mail or the actual agreement they'd signed onto -- and answer some basic
questions. Some were easy: When is your bill is due? Do you get points?
The students always answered those.

The next questions went to
the heart of the deal: Does your credit card have an arbitration clause,
preventing you from suing in court if the company cheats you? No one
knew. How long it would take you to pay off a $1000 purchase with
interest if you paid the minimum monthly payment? They didn't know. And
when I assigned that basic question as homework, almost all of them
spent hours knee deep in fine print without finding an answer.

Markets
work when people can evaluate the prices and risks of different
products, then pick the ones that work best for them. But when the terms
of the deal are hidden, competition doesn't work. And customers aren't
the only ones who are hurt. If a small bank with a limited advertising
budget offered a better card, no one could figure that out and switch.
That had been the state of the consumer credit market for years.

Following
deregulation in the 1980s, a number of big banks figured out that they
could build a very profitable business based on deception -- tricks and
traps buried in fine print, teaser rates that hid the true costs of
mortgages, and obscure terms (like double-cycle billing) than no one
understood. They sold a lot of mortgages, credit cards and other loans,
sometimes deliberately targeting people they knew wouldn't be able to
pay in order to rake big fees off the top before they sold the loans to
someone else.

Eventually the lousy mortgages crashed the economy.
Families that already had been squeezed for a generation got hit from
every direction. Their pensions and savings were wiped out, their
friends and family members lost their jobs, and the values of their
homes plummeted.

So
Sandy Weill, former head of Citigroup, woke up one morning this week to
the epiphany that the banks are too big to fail and should be chopped
up. Well, that’s not exactly cause for bestowing an honor on the guy.

After all, he was the chief architect of too big to fail.

He
was the prime mover behind destroying Glass-Steagall, the New Deal law
that built a wall between commercial banking and investment banking.

Now he wants that wall rebuilt?

Well,
thanks a lot, Sandy, but you already destroyed the economy with your
greedy power play when you ran Wall Street and bullied the Clinton crowd
into foolish deregulation.

RONALD
REAGAN famously said, “We fought a war on poverty and poverty won.”
With 46 million Americans — 15 percent of the population — now counted
as poor, it’s tempting to think he may have been right.

Look a
little deeper and the temptation grows. The lowest percentage in poverty
since we started counting was 11.1 percent in 1973. The rate climbed as
high as 15.2 percent in 1983. In 2000, after a spurt of prosperity, it
went back down to 11.3 percent, and yet 15 million more people are poor
today.

At the same time, we have done a lot that works. From
Social Security to food stamps to the earned-income tax credit and on
and on, we have enacted programs that now keep 40 million people out of
poverty. Poverty would be nearly double what it is now without these
measures, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. To
say that “poverty won” is like saying the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts
failed because there is still pollution.

With all of that, why
have we not achieved more? Four reasons: An astonishing number of people
work at low-wage jobs. Plus, many more households are headed now by a
single parent, making it difficult for them to earn a living income from
the jobs that are typically available. The near disappearance of cash
assistance for low-income mothers and children — i.e., welfare — in much
of the country plays a contributing role, too. And persistent issues of
race and gender mean higher poverty among minorities and families
headed by single mothers.

The first thing needed if we’re to get
people out of poverty is more jobs that pay decent wages. There aren’t
enough of these in our current economy. The need for good jobs extends
far beyond the current crisis; we’ll need a full-employment policy and a
bigger investment in 21st-century education and skill development
strategies if we’re to have any hope of breaking out of the current
economic malaise.

This isn’t a problem specific to the current
moment. We’ve been drowning in a flood of low-wage jobs for the last 40
years. Most of the income of people in poverty comes from work.
According to the most recent data available from the Census Bureau, 104
million people — a third of the population — have annual incomes below
twice the poverty line, less than $38,000 for a family of three. They
struggle to make ends meet every month.

The
gloomy annual report of the trustees of Social Security has provoked
the usual ominous predictions of big trouble ahead. Media accounts spoke
of significant deterioration in the financial outlook of the system,
and declared it unsustainable unless structural changes were made. The
scare words might seem to justify the often-heard prediction that Social
Security may last long enough to sustain our current oldsters, but that
it is headed for bankruptcy and "won't be there" for our younger
citizens.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Into the
future, Social Security can and will provide wage replacement at about
the same level it does now. It does not depend for its resources on an
entity that might run out of money, that has no way to raise more, and
could go into bankruptcy. The U.S. government has the ability to raise
enough revenue to pay out whatever level of Social Security benefits the
public wants. In that, Social Security resembles all the other things
the government pays for, including the national parks, the Food and Drug
Administration, and the Department of Defense.

At what level does the public want retirees supported?

All
indications are that the public is satisfied with benefits that replace
wages at about the present level. Can the richest country in the world
afford to continue to do that? Of course. Our taxes are very low
compared with those of most other developed countries. Our ability to
spend more than we now do on government is very high. If necessary, the
public would support higher taxes to maintain Social Security benefits.

The
doom and gloom about Social Security, and the claims that it needs
radical restructuring, derive from the way Franklin D. Roosevelt's
administration explained the system to the public. To avoid accusations
of "socialism," citizens were made to understand that the pensions they
would get would consist of their own money that they had put into a
trust fund.

The trust-fund story made it politically easier to
start the system and maintain support for it. But that story has made it
vulnerable to the prediction that it is going bankrupt and will have to
be radically changed. After all, if the pensions come out of the trust
fund, and the fund will shrink to zero in about 2033, as predicted, then
isn't the system unsustainable?

In
the Amazonian backcountry, tribes are challenging construction of the
world’s third-largest dam—by dismantling it. Here’s what they can teach
us about standing up to power.

Last
month, hundreds of indigenous demonstrators began dismantling a dam in
the heart of Brazil’s rainforest to protest the destruction it will
bring to lands they have loved and honored for centuries. The Brazilian
government is determined to promote construction of the massive, $14
billion Belo Monte Dam, which will be the world’s third largest when it
is completed in 2019. It is being developed by Norte Energia, a
consortium of ten of the world’s largest construction, engineering, and
mining firms set up specifically for the project.

The Belo Monte
Dam is the most controversial of dozens of dams planned in the Amazon
region and threatens the lives and livelihoods of thousands of Amazonian
people, plants, and animals. Situated on the Xingu River, the dam is
set to flood roughly 150 square miles of already-stressed rainforest and
deprive an estimated 20,000 people of their homes, their incomes,
and—for those who succumb to malaria, bilharzia, and other diseases
carried by insects and snails that are predicted to breed in the new
reservoir—their lives. Moreover, the influx of immigrants will bring
massive disruption to the socioeconomic balance of the region. People
whose livelihoods have primarily depended on hunting and gathering or
farming may suddenly find themselves forced to take jobs as manual
laborers, servants, and prostitutes.

History has shown again and
again that dams in general wreak havoc in areas where they are built,
despite promises to the contrary by developers and governments.
Hydroelectric energy is anything but “clean” when measured in terms of
the excruciating pain it causes individuals, social institutions, and
local ecology. The costs—often hidden—include those associated with the
privatization of water; the extinction of plants that might provide
cures for cancer, HIV, and other diseases; the silting up of rivers and
lakes; and the disruption of migratory patterns for many species of
birds.

The indigenous cultures threatened by the Belo Monte Dam,
including those of the Xikrin, Juruna, Arara, Parakanã, Kuruaya and
Kayapó tribes, are tied to the land: generations have hunted and
gathered and cultivated the same areas for centuries. They—as well as
local flora and fauna—have suffered disproportionately from the effects
of other hydroelectric dams, while rarely gaining any of the potential
benefits. Now they are fighting back.

1968.
That was a hell of a year. The people were on the streets, revolution
was in the air, we released the White Album, and perhaps the most
influential photograph of all time was taken by an astronaut called
William Anders.

It was Christmas Eve. Anders and his mission
commander Frank Borman had just become the only living beings since the
dawn of time to orbit the moon. Then, through the tiny window of their
Apollo 8 spacecraft their eyes fell upon something nobody had seen
before, something so familiar and yet so alien, something breathtaking
in its beauty and fragility. "Oh my God!" Borman cried. "Look at that
picture over there! Here's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!"

"You
got a color film, Jim?" Anders snapped back. "Hand me that roll of
color quick, will you..." For a minute or so, two human beings in a tin
can nearly 400,000 kilometers from home scrambled furiously to fix a
roll of Kodak into their camera. Then Anders lifted it to the window and
clicked the shutter and captured our delicate home planet rising slowly
over the horizon of the moon. Earthrise. That single image
made such an impact on the human psyche that it's credited with sparking
the birth of the global environment movement -- with changing the very
way we think about ourselves.

That was more than 40 years ago, the
blink of an eye in the grand sweep of time, but something quite
remarkable has happened since then. For at least 800,000 years the
Arctic Ocean has been capped by a sheet of sea ice the size of a
continent. But in the decades since that photo was taken, satellites
have been measuring a steady melting of that white sheet. Much of it has
now gone, and it seems likely that there'll be open water at the North
Pole in the lifetimes of my kids. I might even see that moment for
myself.

Think about it. Since Earthrise was taken we've
been so busy warming our world that it now looks radically different
from space. By digging up fossil fuels and burning our ancient forests
we've put so much carbon into the atmosphere that today's astronauts are
looking at a different planet. And here's something that just baffles
me. As the ice retreats, the oil giants are moving in. Instead of seeing
the melting as a grave warning to humanity, they're eyeing the
previously inaccessible oil beneath the seabed at the top of the world.
They're exploiting the disappearance of the ice to drill for the very
same fuel that caused the melting in the first place. Fossil fuels have
colonized every corner of our Earth, but at some time and in some place
we need to say, "No more." I believe that time is now and that place is
the Arctic.

That's why I've joined Greenpeace's campaign to create
a legally protected sanctuary around the North Pole and a ban on oil
drilling and industrial fishing in Arctic waters. My name will be among
at least 2 million that Greenpeace is taking to the pole and planting on
the seabed 4 kilometers beneath the ice. We're coming together to
secure the Arctic for all life on Earth.

Earth's land shown to have warmed by 1.5C over past 250 years, with humans being almost entirely responsible

The
Earth's land has warmed by 1.5C over the past 250 years and "humans are
almost entirely the cause", according to a scientific study set up to
address climate change sceptics' concerns about whether human-induced global warming is occurring.

Prof Richard Muller, a physicist and climate change sceptic who founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (Best)
project, said he was surprised by the findings. "We were not expecting
this, but as scientists, it is our duty to let the evidence change our
minds." He added that he now considers himself a "converted sceptic" and
his views had undergone a "total turnaround" in a short space of time.

"Our
results show that the average temperature of the Earth's land has risen
by 2.5F over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees
over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that
essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of
greenhouse gases," Muller wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times.

The
team of scientists based at the University of California, Berkeley,
gathered and merged a collection of 14.4m land temperature observations
from 44,455 sites across the world dating back to 1753. Previous data
sets created by Nasa, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, and the Met Office and the University of East Anglia's
climate research unit only went back to the mid-1800s and used a fifth
as many weather station records.

So the Mad Hatter of the American conservatism, Pat Buchanan, wrote a piece today called "In the Long Run, is the GOP Dead?"
It’s basically a fatalistic prediction that the GOP is doomed because
it can’t promise enough free lunches for the inexorably rising
percentage of nonwhite voters. And there's a line in there that I hope
he clarifies, because it seemed crazy even for him.

The piece starts off by looking at California as a test case:

In
the Golden Land, a state Nixon carried all five times he was on a
national ticket and Reagan carried by landslides all four times he ran,
the GOP does not hold a single statewide office. It gained not a single
House seat in the 2010 landslide. Party registration has fallen to 30
percent of the California electorate and is steadily sinking.

Buchanan
first posits that perhaps this problem is specific to California, a
place where conservative positions on abortion and gay rights make
statewide wins a challenge. But then he switches to demographics,
quoting generally-astute Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt, the hero of Game Change.

Usually,
at this stage of a presidential campaign, Republicans are doing a much
better job of sullying the Democratic candidate as un-American.

Michael
Dukakis was accused of having a funny last name and failing to say the
Pledge of Allegiance 10 times a day. John Kerry was faulted for acting
French and eating Philly cheese steaks with Swiss cheese. Al Gore was
into the earth and earth tones — need we say more?

And the G.O.P.
has had so much practice over the last four years at skewering Barack
Obama as an existentialist socialist apologist for America with a secret
foreign birth certificate that it should be like shooting mahi-mahi in a
barrel.

The dude used to wear a sarong to do The Sunday Times
crossword puzzle, for Pete’s sake — a look more exotic than Ralph
Lauren’s Chinese French berets. Yet this week’s Republican attacks have
been so shriekingly shrill, they make Poppy Bush campaigning at a New
Jersey flag factory back in 1988 look like a masterpiece of subtlety.

“I
wish this president would learn how to be an American,” said John
Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor, on Tuesday during a Romney
campaign media conference call. (He later apologized.)

He also
went on Fox News to assert that the president “has no idea how the
American system functions, and we shouldn’t be surprised about that,
because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the
next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia, and
frankly, when he came to the U.S., he worked as a community organizer,
which is a socialized structure.”

Second quarter figures show 5.7 million Spaniards now out of work, including 53% of under-25s, as austerity measures bite

Spain's
unemployment rate hit record levels in the second quarter of this year,
leaving one in four of the working population jobless as austerity
continued to bite and fears of a national bailout grew.

Figures
released by the national statistics institute revealed that the second
quarter, traditionally a time when employment picks up for the tourist
season, recorded a rise in unemployment to 24.6% as a further 53,000
people joined dole queues. That broke a previous record set during
Spain's last major recession 18 years ago.

Some 5.7 million Spaniards are now unemployed. The under-25s are suffering most, with 53% unable to find work.

One
in three people are now jobless in the Canary Islands and across a
swath of western and southern Spain covering the regions of Extremadura
and Andalucia.

Almost half of the unemployed have now been out of
work for more than a year as the devastating decline in construction
jobs that began four years ago shows no sign of improvement.

Cuts
in government, regional and municipal spending have prompted the number
of public sector workers to fall by 5% over the past year. Town halls
have cut their workforces by 11% over the same period.

The
government has admitted that Spain's double-dip recession will continue
for at least another full year, with the economy set to contract in both
2012 and 2013. Job creation is unlikely to be boosted in the near
future.

Because
of a gap in the U.S. health care system, one college student is being
forced to choose between her education and saving her own life.

Katie
Slowe, 19, was dropped from her state's health insurance program,
MassHealth, on her 19th birthday because she is a full-time student at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, CBS Boston reports.

Slowe,
who is diabetic, needs an insulin pump to stay alive. But she cannot
afford one without health insurance: It costs nearly $1,000 per month,
according to CBS Boston.

Now, Slowe has to choose between college and life-saving health care. Massachusetts could provide
her insulin but not the insulin pump, which her mom says is necessary
for controlling her diabetes and preventing complications such as
blindness and kidney failure, CBS Boston reports. Slowe cannot afford
her college's health insurance program because it is not covered by
financial aid. If Slowe were no longer a student, she could be covered
by MassHealth.

Slowe's dilemma results from a major gap in the Affordable Care Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2010 and the Supreme Court upheld last month. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, young people
now can remain on their parents' private health insurance plans until
age 26, but the provision does not apply to state health insurance
programs, such as MassHealth, which covers Slowe's mother and other
people in need.

If Slowe drops out of college, she may have to contend with lower earnings for the rest of her life.

When
it comes to making homophobic statements, the Catholic Church in
Scotland has often led the way in Britain in recent years. Cardinal
Keith O'Brien, the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and Britain's
most senior Catholic, has a track record of extreme pronouncements on
gay-rights-related-issues, and earlier prompted outrage by comparing the legalisation of gay marriage with the legalisation of slavery.

Considering
O'Brien's record, it should perhaps come as little surprise that Philip
Tartaglia, the newly-appointed Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, has
stepped into a row over homophobia before he has even officially taken
up his new post.

A report in the Scotsman reveals
that, in a speech delivered at a conference in Oxford in April,
Tartaglia suggested that the tragic death of a 44-year-old Labour MP may
have been linked to the fact that he was gay. David Cairns died last
year from Pancreatitis but, in remarks reminiscent of the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir's controversial take
on the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, Tartaglia asked his
audience to consider whether there is a connection between early deaths
and sexual orientation:

Don Perry, head spokesman for Chick-fil-A, has died.
The
Atlanta-based company said Perry died "suddenly" Friday morning. Perry,
who most recently was vice president of public relations, had worked
with the chain for nearly 29 years, according to Chick-fil-A.

“He
was a well-respected and well-liked media executive in the Atlanta and
University of Georgia communities, and we will all miss him,” the
company said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers are with his
family.”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson